Last Updated on October 24, 2018 by David
Welcome to our introduction of Chatbots to the world of Re:amaze! Before we take a look at what’s in store for Re:amaze Chatbots, please take a moment to read our Co-Founder’s piece on Chatbots written for our partners over at BigCommerce. You can find the article below:
The World of Chatbots: Customer Service, Business Automation & Scalability
Let’s get started!
We believe chatbots are great not only for customer service in just about every industry but it’s especially great for eCommerce because so many customer questions can be predicted with high degrees of confidence.
Because chatbots can help with most common frustrations such as getting simple things answered quickly or getting some basic information about a business, they can easily perform basic frontline support tasks.
For example, when a customer asks a common shipping question, a chatbot can easily understand the context and provide an FAQ article explaining your shipping policies.
If a customer wants to know how they can place an international order, a chatbot is uniquely suited to provide a quick answer to that.
And even if a customer is asking how they can talk to a human, the chatbot can easily escalate the request to your support team.
These types of conversational marketing techniques can take a significant amount of time for your staff to answer even though the answers are fairly standardized.
By allowing a simple conversational bot to take over these frontline questions and concerns, you can significantly reduce the number of resources needed to satisfy customers.
However, we didn’t want to build just another general purpose chatbot that pretends it can handle just about anything and can take weeks to build out and roll out.
Since no customer conversation is truly 100% like another, chatbots that replace or augment human conversations shouldn’t be a one size fits all ordeal either.
Re:amaze Chatbots will focus on introducing the concept of “micro bots”, or chatbots that are have limited scope but very good at specific tasks. These micro bots can be helpers for getting order info, getting shipping info, getting product reviews, etc. They can be deployed by store owners in sequence and in context, offering personalized chatbot conversations that happen in phases. Most chatbot solutions today are multipurpose chatbots and can be difficult to deal with at times.
The first Chatbot we’re introducing to Re:amaze is the “Hello Bot”. Hello Bot can automatically respond to customers when a short, non-descriptive, message is detected and ask customers to provide more details.
The Re:amaze Hello Bot can be activated for Re:amaze Real Time Messaging and Classic Live Chat during Beta.
The second Chatbot we’re introducing to Re:amaze is the “FAQ Bot”. FAQ Bot can automatically suggest relevant FAQ articles based on the customer’s initial and follow-up inquiry. The FAQ Bot utilizes machine learning to surface articles that it feels would help customers the most. Over time, the FAQ Bot should learn from customer feedback in the form of simple “Yes” or “No” responses as to whether or not the suggestions were helpful.
The FAQ Bot’s sole purpose is to extend the power and usability of your Re:amaze FAQ. By introducing well documented articles with important keywords and meta data, the FAQ Bot will be able to better help customers.
At any point during the customer’s interaction with the FAQ Bot, they can pick the option to talk to a human and be transferred to a live customer service agent.
The Re:amaze FAQ Bot can be activated for Re:amaze Real Time Messaging and Classic Live Chat during Beta.
To customize the messaging your Re:amaze Chatbots will employ when responding to customers, please go to Re:amaze Settings > Brands > Text Customization.
Please note that Re:amaze Chatbots is still in Beta and we appreciate any feedback you have so we can improve future iterations!
What happens during Beta?
When our team releases a Beta product, such as Re:amaze Chatbots to the community, it means many features are still in active development and we’re proactively taking on customer feedback.
If you have something you want to let our team know about please don’t hesitate to reach out! If you want to report a bug or suggest a feature improvement, now’s the perfect time to let us know!
We have big plans for Chatbots in the Re:amaze ecosystem for 2019 and we’d love nothing more than to have you around for the adventure.
So what’s next for Chatbots in Re:amaze?
While our development roadmap is constantly being updated, our team does have a good idea for where we want to take Chatbots. So here’s a quick look at what we’re thinking about:
- Bot Builder so you can create specific conversational scenarios with Re:amaze Chatbots
- Commerce Bot so customers can converse with a chatbot to check order status when you have either Shopify or BigCommerce connected.
- Shipping Bot so customers can converse with a chatbot to check shipping status when you have either Shopify or BigCommerce connected.
- Lead Bot to help you capture leads by asking online customers a series of qualifying questions and potentially scheduling an appointment of some sort.
- Follow-Up Bot so a Chatbot can automatic bot follow up after a conversation has ended.
- Office Hours handling with Chatbots so you can turn chatbots on and off during specific hours.
Enjoy and please let us know if you have any questions!